reflections on the christ myth

8/12/2019 Reflections on the Christ Myth

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he hrist MythPrinted and published by the

Historical Review Press,PO Box 62, Uckfield, Sussex, TN22 IZY, UK .

ISBN: 0-906879-36-1

Christianity is a fusion of two myths. The Jesus myth requires no explication. It isclear that the stories collected in the "New Testament" are versions of a folk-taleformed , like the legend of Robin Hood , by the accretion around a cen tral figure ofepisodes in the careers of a number of minor figures. The Jesus of that legend wasa composite formed from tales about Jesus ben Ananias,'Jesu s ben Pandera,2 heagitator, whose name may have been Jesus, who led a party of his followers intoJerusalem during the celebration of the Passover and was well received by thepopulace, but soo n suppressed , and Judas the Gaulanite'. And it is possible, ofcourse, that there was an otherwise forgotten Jesus who also tried to start a Jewishrevolt against civilized rule and paid the penalty. The composite Jesus was, ofcourse, a would-be christ and interested only in his own barbarous people. Thestories in the "New Testament" have been embellished by Christians, and that iswhat is remarkable.

The Christ myth is puzzling, an historical problem that is still unsolved. In-deed, if considered a pr orr as an historical phenomenon, it is astounding. TheJesus of the composite legend was a would-be christ, who anticipates the basicdoctrine of the Talmud, that Jews are a unique form of life, vastly superior to allother peoples, who, at best, if totally submissive to God's People, may aspire tothe status of dogs. He boasts that he brings not peace, but a sword, so he probablywanted to rouse the Jews scattered throughout the world as well as those in Pales-tine to start slaughtering the civilized peoples, as did his successors in the greatJewish onspiracy of 117. Yet this Implacable enemy of the Aryans was trans-formed by the Christ myth into a god that Aryans worshippedThe Jews, naturally and, from their standpoint, reasonably, hate all Aryans,but they feel a specially intense hatred for Aryans who are so intelligent andmanly that they resent being herded and fleeced by their Jewish shepherds andrefuse to believe in the enormous racial superiority that entitles Jews to own theentire planet. When the Germans tried to have a country of their own, interna-tional Jewry sent against Germany their stupid British hounds and eventually theirrabid American mastiffs, who obediently and foully murdered the German leadersto prove to the world that resistance to God's People is an unforgivable sin that ispunished by torture and death. That we all know.

Now, if, in the coming century, say by the year 2100, the Jews begin to vener-ate Hermann Goering or Alfred Rosenberg or Julius Streicher as their divinelyinspired Saviour and worship him as a Son of God and an incarnation of theirYahweh, that would be astounding, wouldn't it? Yes, but not more incred ible thanthe transformation of a Jewish christ into a Saviour of Aryans and a god.

It is to solve this historical paradox that Nicholas Carter has written his new


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book, The Christ Myth.4 Mr. C arter will be remembered for his excellent book,The Late G reat Book, the BibleS in which he reached and en forced the conclusionthat "the establishment of Christianity in the West represents one of the greatesttragedies that has ever befallen the human race."He persuasively finds the key to the paradoxical enigma In the effect of Greekcidlization on the barbarous Jews. It will be necessary, therefore, to begin withthe sixth century B.C. As we all know, Cyrus the Great, the founder of the PersianEmpire, showed great favor to the Jews, probably to recompense their work insubverting the Babylonian Empire and betraying the city of Babylon into his hands.The Jews so needed his protection that they flattered him by calling him their~ h r i s t , ~.e., a being divinely sent and inspired by Yah to save his people. Soonafter 538 B.C., Cyrus rewarded them (as the British were to do much later) bygiving them permission to take over for themselves a part of Palestine. Soon afterthey were establ ished in Jerusalem, a co ntingen t of wealthy Jews from Babylonundertook a drastic reformation of their tribal religion. They eliminated theirgoddess and three other gods, and recognized Yah (or Ya'u), a god they had takenover from the Canaanites, as the patron god of their race.'

H LL NISMThe special protection of the Jews by Cyrus was continued by his successors untilthe Persian Em pire was conquered by Alexander the Gre at. That was a truly ep-ochal event. The entire Near and Middle East was transformed. The vast andincontestable superiority of the world's first rational civilization, made evident toall by its invincible military power, was apparent to all the diverse populations ofthose lands. The Greeks built cities that were the focus of a truly great and rationalculture. Everyone above the peasantry sedulously imitated Greek customs, in-cluding athletic contests and games. The conquered populations hastened to learnas much Greek as they could, and Aramaic, the Semitic language that had beenthe lingu a fran ca of the Orient and used even by the Persians as the language ofadministration, became a vu lgar and despised dialect, used only by the lowest andmost ignorant classes.Even the Jews, whose language was Aramaic (Hebrew was known only to themore learned members of the priesthood), were affected by their force d exposureto civilization. Jews who had any capacity for assimilating or simulating culturelearned Greek, and usually changed their Canaanite names for distinctively Greeknames by a kind of fixed conversion; e.g., a man named Jesus called himselfJason, by allusion to the famous Argonaut, and Matthew became Menelaus, inhonor of the celebrated husband of Helen. The names of cities were likewisechanged; e.'g., Amorah bec ame Ariopolis, a nd Akko became Ptolemai's. Even inthe Temple at Jerusalem the signs regulating admission to the sanctuary werewritten in Greek. This process of real or simulated conversion to civilization wasfacilitated by the fact that the Jews continued to enjoy under Alexander and theDiadochi who succeeded him the privileges they had been given by the Persians.

The Jewish Encyc lopaed ia (12 vols. quarto; New York, Funk Wagnalls, 1901-1906) admits (s.v. 'Hellenism') that "Alexander .. and the first Ptolemies andSeleucids . treated their Jewish subjects with much benevolence. 9What Christians call the "Old Testament" (including books and parts of booksthat are omitted in most Bibles), originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic,lohadto be translated into G reek for the benefit of Jews who could not read A ramaic,which had once been their native tongue." The result was the Septuagint, whtchtakes its name from a typical Jewish forgery, the letter concocted in the name ofAristeas (supposedly a Greek who could not write really correct Greek), whichcertifies that the Septua gint was directly inspired or ra ther dictat ed by Yah himself(his name may have been by that time Judaized by changing it to Yahweh).''Educated Jews, wishing to make their tribe respectable in the eyes of civilizedmen, followed their racial proclivity and invented sons of Abraham who had beencompanions of Hercules, and descendants of Isaac who had sailed with theArgonauts Later, growing bolder, they identified Moses with Musa eus, the mythicalson of Orpheus (or of Linu s, the myth ~ca l nvento r of sustaltic music), who livedlong before Homer, wrote didactic verse and hymns, and, being a divinely giftedseer, like Tiresias, left a collection of oracular utterances.To a modern reader, this will seem to be mere trifling, but when Jews identi-fied their Yahweh with Zeus, the consequences changed history. Somewhere alongthe line, Zeus was identified with the Zeus of Cleanthes' hymn, i.e., God in theChristian misuse of that word; he was the god of Stoic monotheism, also calledProvidence and the Mind of the Universe (animus mundi). That converted Yahwehfrom a tribal deity, who fought for h ~ sace and ,overcame the gods of other na-tions, into the unique and supreme god of the universe. That was an arrogantclaim that altered Jewish consciousness, and was maintained even by the Jews whomost resented civilization and returned to their primitive barbarism.With even greater effrontery, educated Jews began to claim that one or an-other aspect of civilization was of Jewish origin. They had learned the method ofallegorical interpretation from the Stoics,13 and by outrageously twisting the textsof their sacred books (in Greek translation), they proved their point with the facil-ity of a shyster lawyer. This impudent hoaxing reached its fullest developmentwith a Jewish "philosopher," Ari~tobulus, '~ho, c. 150 B.C., brazenly claimedthat the philosophy of Aristotle and, indeed, the whole of Greek culture was de-rived from the "Old Testament" He naturally forged some Greek verse, purport-edly from early Greek poets, to prove some of his points.A far more moderate and intelligent practitioner of the allegorical method wasPhilo Judaeus (c. 20 B.C.- c. A.D. 50), on whom Mr. Carter concentrates hisattention . Althou gh his enemies may have exaggerated when they claime d that hedid not know a word of Aramaic (to say nothing of Hebrew), it is true that all hisknowledge of the Jews' holy books came from the Septuagint. He was a learnedman, and, if I am not mistaken, acquired a command of r k that no otherJewish author ever attained.15


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We especially remember Philo for his candid admission that the tale in theOld Testament about an arm ed conquest of Palestine led by Jesus (alias Joshua)is preposterous, and that what must have happened is that the Canaanites, theirminds muddled by old Yahweh, admitted the Jews to their country as eminentlypious refugees and permitted the immigrants to organize their synagogues andflm ris h until they were ready to take over the country of their enemies for theJews considered the foolish Canaanites as their enemies and entered Canaan in-tending to kill or enslave their stupid hosts as soon as they had sufficiently pen-etrated the fools' country American boobs will soon learn that the barbariansnever change their tactics or their nature.We should also remem ber Philo for his formulation of the 'On e World ho-kum that is now so widely used as sucker-bait for dim-witted Aryans. H e affirmedthat the Divine Plan (h6yoc B~ io q) rranges the rise and fall of nations to the endthat the whole of our world should be as a single state, enjoying that best of consti-tutions, democracy. I6Philo was a well-educated and learned man, admirably well versed in Greekliterature and philosophy, and Mr. Carter r ightly takes him as a model of'Hellenized' Jews, all of whom he lumps together as the Letzim. But we mustreme mber that he remained a Jew. You cannot read very far in Philo 's rathe rcopio us writings without becoming aware of an alien mentality. He had, as Ihave said, a good command of the noble language, but when he writes hh fp e~ a ,hecorresponding adjective, &hq0fi~,-5, and their derivatives, he does not mea n whatthe words mean in respectable Greek. To the rational G reek (Aryan) mind, truth issomething that can and must be objectively determined: it denotes veracity as op-posed to lying, facts as opposed to fancies, reality as opposed to lllusory appear-ances. Truth is factual and must be determined by observation and reason. ForPhilo, however, 'truth' is what he thlnks Yahweh said in the Scriptures he wrote andwhat he therefore wants. 'Truth' for Philo is not what is, but what ought to be. It isthe Jewish religion, as he understands it, after revising it with his allego rical inter-pretations. It is Faith and therefore irrational. There can be no greater antithesisthan between the Greeks' rational and objective truth and the truth of unreason,as Bertrand Russell aptly termed faith in religions, fictions about supernatural be-ings that soothe and comfort weaklings who are afraid to contemplate the grimworld of reality.Philo was really uninterested in truth as the Greeks and all rational men con-ceive it. Since Philo constantly tries to equate h is re l ig ion to Sto ic i~rn , '~oushould particularly notice that no Stoic would ever have countenanced his faith inthe truth of unrea son. (See the Appendix on Stoicism ).Philo and all of the Lerzim we have mentioned thus far differ radically fromother Letzim whom we must now consider.

HEROIC FAILUREIt is the great virtue of Mr Carter's book that he forces us to consider critically aJewish and Christian generalization about the history of Judaea in the secondcentury B.C He makes us aware that it is highly probable that, besides the Letzimmentioned above, who tried to salvage Judaism by forgery, hoaxes, and sciolisticdistortions of evidence, there were educated and enlightened Jews who faced theproblem candidly and saw that the only solution was to abandon Jewish claims toimmeasurable racial superiority, to jettison the barbaric c ult, and to adopt civili-zation wholeheartedly.The detailed history of this period is a Gordian knot, depending principallyon Josephus (Antiquitates) and the second book of Maccabees (w hich is found insome Christian Bibles); both were bitter enemies of the Hellenizing faction, butcontradict each other and are also at variance with the few indications to be de-rived fro m trustworthy historical sources.20What is clear, however, is that, as aresult of some one of the continual upheavals in Judaea, a Jew named Jesus, whohad adopted a civilized name, Jason, became the high priest in Jerusalem, prob-ably in 17 3 B.C. althou gh possibly several years earlier. He represented Letzimwho wanted to introduce Greek culture into Jerusalem, and he evidently clearedan area in the city and founded what seems to have been a kind of Greek-stylegymnasium, serving both for athletics (which orthodox Jews abominated) and as akind of open club in which educated men could meet for intelligent and oftenphilosophical discussion (which the orthodox also abominated).In 171 and for reasons wh ich are not quite clear but may be related to familyfeuds, Jesus-Jason was succeeded by a man who may have been a relative and whochanged his name to M enela us.?' He is the focus of Mr. C arter's cogen t revision ofthe Jewish and Christian story which had never been effectually challenged.According to that story, Menelaus was a Jew so wicked that he became theinstrument of the awful pagan king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who wanted topersecute God's sweet little lambs and suppress worship of the One True God(beastly old Yahweh). That is patently absurd. Although it is true that the Seleucids,descendants of one of Alexander's generals, were not only cultivated men them-selves, but doubtless perceived the value of a dominant civilization in promotingsome sort of unity among their multi-rack1 subjects, Antiochus, as a prudentruler, was primarily interested in finding a way to end the perpetual turmoil inJudaea, where normal communications along the major trade routes were oftenmade almost impossible because the sweet little lambs were perpetually riotingand killing one another, using religious pretexts to justify a perpetual successio nof petty but destructive civil wars. And the attribution of wicked pagan pur-poses to Antiochus becomes absurd when the enemies of Menelaus charge that hewas so corrupt that he bought the support of Antiochus with an enormous bribe.That sufficiently shows who took the initiative and vindicates Menelaus's sincerity.Mr. Carter's work reminds us that we have no reason to doubt that Menelaus


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was a cultivated and highly intelligent Jew who saw that the only remedy forbarbarism is civilization, and that the only way to civilize the Jews was to abolishtheir disgusting superstition. That attitude won him the sympathy of Antiochusand a measure of support that was soon greatly increased.Antiochus was at war with Ptolemaic Egypt and invaded that country. In 168a rumour reached Palestine that Antiochus had been defeated and killed. M enelauswas expelled by Jesus-Jason and his faction, who had been engaged in treasonableintrigues with the Egyptians, in preparation for an Egyptian occupation of Jerusa-lem. W hat had really happened, however, was that Antiochus had won w hat shouldhave been a decisive victory, but had been prevented from following it up by theintervention of an envoy from the Roman Senate, P opillius Laenas, w ho, in effect,made Egypt a Roman pr~ tec tora te .~~As soon as the truth was known, Jason fled and Menelaus was restored to hispriestly dignity. We should note, however, that both Hellenizers had large popula rfollowings.The net effect of this was to make Antiochus, who had been humiliated by theRomans and prevented from ending the menace to his langdom from Egypt, will-ing to use his army to support Menelaus, who, officially the high priest of theJews, proceeded to abolish all the innumerable and zulgar regulations of theLaw, the superstition about the Sabbath, and , above all, the savage sexual muti-lation by whlch the Jews dtfferentiated themselves physically from civilized man-kind. Menelaus was undoubtedly supported by a sizeable minority of educatedJews, many or m ost of whom engaged surgeons to uncircumcize them.He is a man whom we should honor and whose failure we must regret.It is hard to say in what proportion piety and political ambition dominated thewealthy Jewish clan who were descended from a m an whose name, passing throughGreek, was Hasmonaeus (Asamonaeus in some sources). A member of this clanmurdered a priest who was about to perform a sacrifice in accordance with thenew rule, and fled to the wilderness, where he organized gangs of bandits whoflourished by raiding towns, slaying educated Jews, and grabbing their property.They won the support of the lower classes, already jealous of their betters, and, asyou know, it is almost impossible to suppress such banditry without helicopters.Antiochus' governor, Lysias, underestimated the difficulty and made ineffectualattempts to suppress them , which the Jewish w riters have naturally magnified intogreat victories for Yahweh's people. These Hasmonaeans, now more commonlyknown as Maccabees from the epithet given them, derived from an Aramaic w ordmeaning 'hammer, mace,' were for a considerable time merely outlaws and pests.There can be no doubt but that Antiochus was now prepared to give Menelausfull support, and there isSnodoubt but that no amount of barbarous fanaticismcould have prevailed against an army that was still organized with Macedoniantactics and discipline. The Jewish problem would have been solved forever ifAntiochus had not been distracted by the need to protect his eastern borders againstthe Parthians, and not even then, if he had not died, evidently from poison or a8

contagious fever, at Gabae, in or near what is now Afghanistan.Lysias, Antiochus's governor of Syria, was evidently a mediocre man. Whenhe failed to suppress the bandits, he had the foolish idea that he could end histroubles by forcing on Menelaus a compromise. The bandits wcre given amnesty;the Hasmonaeans were admitted to the city; the traditional rites of Yahweh werelargely restored with only an addition to content the Hellenizers; and, of course,the situation became more intolerable than ever, since the Hasmonaeans usedtheir new position for aggression on the civilized minority everywhere.When Lysias finally saw the consequences of his folly, he took the requisiteaction. He mobilized his army, occupied Jerusalem and other cities, and restoredorder.2' He would probably have solved the Jewish problem permanently, if thebarbarian rabble had not again been saved by a perverse fate. Antiochus's heir wasa boy of ten,24who had been left in the care of Lysias, but Antiochus, shortlybefore his death, discontented with Lysias's blundering, named one his friends,Philip, the regent for the boy and governor of Syria. The news of Philip's adventreached Lysias in Jerusalem and, in a panic, he negotiated another shameful com-promise with the Hasmonaeans and their rabble, sacrificing even Menelaus totheir hatred, and hastened home in a vain attempt to retain his governorship andtake the regency for himself.Thus ended one of the great tragedies of history with a catastrophe from whichwe still suffer today.25We need not linger over the intricate history of what followed. The Hasmonaeansruled Judaea, profited from the weakening of the Seleucid Empire to make theircountry independent, and occupied themselves with wars of aggression againsttheir neighbours to increase the territory under their rule.26 It is noteworthy thatthey soon assumed Greek names, from Hyrcanus and Aristobulus to the last ofthe line, Antiochus.The surviving Hellenizers either escaped from Judaea or became Sadducees,

who observed the Jews' Law, at least outwardly, but intelligently refused tobelieve in immortal spooks or the other superstitions dear to the Pharisees, whoeventually attained complete dominion over the Jews.We have now sketched, as summarily as I could, the antecedents requisite foran understanding of our problem.

THE NEW AGEWe have also reached the beginning of the historical era established by a Scythianmonk who had come to Rome, Dionysius Exiguus, c. A.D. 540. According to hiscalculations, the supposed birth of Jesus marked the beginning of the First Cen-tury 8 in the era now in common use.Mr Carter d~sp oses f that century correctly: There were no ~hris tia ns ,either Gentile or Je w~ sh, iving during the first century. 29In fact, we have no secure traces of Christians before 135 the year in which

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the last christ of any importance, Shim eon ben Kosiba, common ly called Bar-Kok hba,w as ~ u p p r e s s e d . ~ ~is failure conclusively proved to intelligent Jews that while theirgod might help them treacherously attack unsuspecting goyim and torture them todeath, o ld Yahweh always skedaddled when the Roman legions moved in. W hetherit is more than a coincidence that, so far as we know, the promotion of Christianitybegan soon after 135, is anybody's guessChristianity presupposes the Christ Myth, which must, therefore, have beeninvented shortly after 135, if not before. What can have been the origin of thatamazing myth? It cannot have been derived from any Jewish sect, least of all,f rom that of the E s~ ene s.~ ' hile it is likely that at least one of the figures thatcontributed to the composite hero of the Jesus Myth was an Essene, who de-nounced the Pbarisees, the Essenes, as Mr. Carter has shown, were fanaticallyand exclusively Jewish, and would no more have thought of saving the souls (ifany) of goyim than they would have banqueted on roast pig.The very foundation of the Christ Myth was borrowed from India. It created achrist who was modeled on Krishna (Krsna) who was the eighth avatar of Vishnu(Visnu). This presupposes the Hindu doctrine that gods may become incarnate asmorta ls to act as Saviours of mankind a notion that every religious Jew wouldhave rejected with horror. The Hindu concept also includes metempsychosis, andpious Jews would have been made furious by a suggestion that men have souls thatsurviv e death by being reincarnated As shown by the presence of Magi at thebirth of the non-Jewish christ, there was also an influence of the Zoroastrian cult,which by that time had assimilated both astrology and the notion that a Saviour(Saojlant) would come to deliver the world from evil; and, as everyone knows,the shepherds who witnessed the Nativity of Jesus were copies of the shepherdswho witnessed the earthly birth of the Zoroastrian Son of God, M ithra. A god whocould be concerned with anyone but the Chosen was utterly repugnant to theJewish mind and a christ who could interest himself in goyim was an abominationas well as an impossibility.The Christ Myth was obviously invented to create a christ (necessarily Jew-ish) who could be made acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudelyamended and refashioned for that purpose.

That brings us to another puzzle. Once devised, the Christ Myth spread withamazing rapidity. Thirty years after 35we find little groups of Christians all overthe landscape, and by the end of the Second Century they are divided into largesects, furiously damning one another to Hell, scribbling innumerable gospels andforged documents32, and even able to exert some influence in the tolerant R omanEmpire and to concoct lurid tales about the persecutions which they, like the Jews,liked to pretend they had suffered. That rapid spread of a strange superstitionrequired intensive and expensive promotion.

Christian tradition speaks of a Jew nam ed Saul Caovh),who mus t have been insome way regarded as an innovator, since many of the Christian sects produced

letters attributed to him to attest their orthodoxy And a book included in the NewTesta ment, Acts (Acta Apostolorum ), contains stories about itinerant evangelistswhich, though displaced chronologically, may correspond roughly to part of theprom otion. But that promotion obviously require d organization and money. Weare asked to suppose that hordes of proletarians and a few eccentrics flocked to theglad tidings because they were so charm ing. That is fiction. Millions of dollarshave been spent to promote L. Ron Hubbard's invention, Scientology, but despiteall the facilities for almost world-wide propaganda provided by the press, radio, andrapid travel, the cult still has only a small and scattered band of converts.Yet it is not more alien to the general tenor of American society or more dissi-dent from the beliefs of all the current religious sects than the cult of a Jewish christwas alien to the tenor of society in every part of the Roman Empi re or more stronglyopposed to the religion and superstition of every region in it. Even the Christianevangelists, who can use the boob-tubes to rake in hundreds of millions of dollarsfrom superstitious suckers. have to be lavishly financed before they can begin op-erations ??The promotion of Christianity must have required, as I have said, a fairlylarge organization and ample resour ces. But cui bono? Who stood to profit in oneway or another from that effort to impose an alien superstition on the populationof the Roman Empire?Mr. Carter has the first plausible answer that I have seen: the Letzim, that is,the Jews living in their colonies outside Judaea and in Hellenistic cities. This iscertainly an adequate and attractive explanation. We must, I think, accept it.When, however, we try to determine the purposes of those Letzim, we mustchoose between two almost antithetical theories.

ONE HYPOTHESISRelations between Jews and goyim outside Judaea have always been strained andprecarious, except when one has attained such complete dominance a s to force theother into hypocritical submission. The Jews, in their scattered colonies through-out the civilized world, needed to ensure themselves against resentment, and thisneed became urgent after the decisive failure to take over the world by force withthe putative assistance of a Yahweh who always ran when there was danger.In the simplest terms, making Judaism respectable in the eyes of their pa-gan neighbors was no longer a matter of inventing sons of Abraham who hadbeen companions of H ercules or of forging letters from a Lacedaemonian king roprove that the Sparta ns were really a lost tribe of Jews. What could be moreeffective than a christ sent by Yahweh to save the souls of Gentiles?And if the stupid goyim could be made to believe that a Jewish god was theanimus mundi of the Stoic monotheism, and that he had sent his Jewish Son intothe world to bring Salvation to the lesse r breeds outside the Law, this notioncould be made the basis of a theology that would sap the virility and rationality of


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the more intelligent goyim and destroy their ability to detect and resent the depre-dations of their parasites and their own gradual descent Into slavery. The newreligion, which would, of course, have to be distinguished sharply from the racialexclusiveness and arrogance of the Judaism with which everyone was then famil-iar,could be made an hallucinatory drug, an enslaving opiate, that would eventu-ally make its addicts helpless sheep, to be herded for the profit of their shepherds.If the inventors of Christianity did not envisage this use of it with a foresightand cunning that may seem superhuman, they must have realized in subsequentcenturies what a marvelous weapon they had inadvertently forged. This is a dras-tic hypothesis and will seem novel and implausible to many, but it can be sup-ported by one datum for which ~ t would be hard to suggest another exp lanation .Once Christianity was launched, the Jews were evidently determined to retaincontrol of itThat is the most reasonable explanation of the eventual failure of the MarcionistChurch, which was a form of Christianity far more plausible than the doctrine thatfinally triumphed.Marcion was a wealthy shipowner at Sinope, now the Turkish town of Sinopon the south shore of the Black Sea, but then the largest port and commercialcenter east of Byzantium. Sinope was founded as a Greek colony and long re-mained a Greek city, but there had been a continuous influx of other peoples. Wehave no information about Marcion's ancestors.When Christian propaganda reached him, he saw, as all reasonable men must,that the ferocio us, vindictive, and cruel god of the Old Testament was utterlyincompatible with the god of mercy and love preconized by Pauline Christianity,and he accordingly decided that Yahweh was only the Demiurge, creator of thematerial world, but inferior to the good and supreme god who sent his Son (anavatar of himself) to save mankind from the De m i ~ r g e . ~ ~Jesus made his appearance in the guise of a man of about thirty, but theignorant apostles mistook him for a Jewish christ, and the Jews showed theirirremediable perversity by crucifying a simulacrum of him (of course, a god couldnot be killed). He had, however, been recognized by Paul. Marcion had a versionof the gospel attributed to a man from Lucania (Greek Aom ~, atin Lucanuscommonly 'Luke' in English, a s though it were a man's nam e), and a collection ofletters attribute d to Paul that justified M arcion's theology. He may have had otherholy books, and he wrote a work, Antitheses, conclusively proving that Yahweh wasthe very antithes is of the Pauline god, and that the Old Testament was incompat-ible with Christianity.He went to Rome, then the capital'of the civilized world, but found JudaizingChristians already established there. He founded his own church (c. 150 , whichnaturally appealed to persons susceptible to the new religion but not incapable ofthought . His was a comparatively innocuous form of Christia nity one that thelate Dr. Hamblin, an erudite and highly intelligent man, tried to revive in ou r timeto provide for the populace a form of Christianity that was not culturally and12

racially poisonous.Marcion's Church did attract a numerous following and it may have been, fora time, the largest Christian sect, with congregations throughout the Empire, butit was the target of the most bitter animosity of the well-financed gang known asFathers of the Church, who were determ ined to keep the Old Testament as thebasis of their cult. The Marcionist Churches declined in the Third and FourthCenturies, perhaps because they were not sufficiently fanatical and skilled in in-trigue, but they survived even after the Fathers of the Church were at last able tostart persecuting with the police powers of the captive state at their disposal.35Why the Fathers should have chosen to burden their cult with the onerousand malodorous bundle of fictions of the Old Testam ent , which blatantly con-tradicted the very doctrine they were peddling, is almost inexplicable, except onthe assumption that it was made profitable for them And we must not forget that,wlth very few exceptions, we really do not know which early Christian theolo-gians were converted Jews or stooges for the Jews, like the contemptible hire-lings who now misgovern Germany.So much for one interpretation of the admittedly fragmentary evidence (asdistinct from inferences).

N LTERN TIVEMr. Carter presents a radically different theory about the origins of Christianitysometime in the First Century.He takes his departure from the Stephen who appears in Acts, 6 5 -7,60, andis mentioned occasionally in subsequent chapters. The man's Greek name doesnot prove that he was a Hellenistic Jew, and we are told that he did great wondersand miracles (daza ~ iq p ~ i a ~ydrha ) mong the people, which sounds asthough he were just another of the goerae who swarmed through Asia Minor at thattime.'bIn Acts, Stephen delivers a summary of the Jewish tradition about Abraham andhis success ors. and then upbraids the orthodox for their rejection of Jesus. Hisspeech receives divine approval, for, looking up through a rift in the atmosphere, hesees God with Jesus at his right hand. The San hedrin, however, condemn him andthe mob stones him, a particularly brutal form of killing, which they enjoyed on thepretense that it did not involve bloodshed.Mr. Carter dismisses the story in Acts as a Christian concoction. He believesthat Stephen and his companions (all of whom bear Greek names) were membersof the New Letz im, who had assimilated the Stoic doctrine with its emphasis onall humanity and wished to bring Judaism into accord with it, insisting that theOne God of the Universe is everybody's Go d. And he composes (p. 79 thespeech that Stephen would have uttered, if he could, before he finally died. It isworthy of Epictetus.Saul-Paul was a man who first approved the murder of Stephen, but reconsid-

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ered and joined the New Letzim, whose doctrines, a fusion of Judaism withStoicism, Mr. Ca rter adumbrates with the proviso that the Mystic Gospel of Jew-ish Hellenists cannot be reconstructed in detail. We cannot measure the complex -ity of the involvement of the protagon ists he degree, that is, to which the HellenicJews may have tried to fuse Greek and Jewish speculations. For the purpose of thisstudy it is enough to conclude that Gentile ethics were the driving force behind theactivities of the Letzim.These Letzim may have come to regard Stephen as a messianic figure, thusresulting in the transform ation of the martyred Stephen into both a JESUS37 nda CHRIST in the minds of his worshipers, by at least the turn of the secondcentury.There was really no reason why the Letzim should not have sponsored such anovel cult. For one thing, the real centre of Jewish power was not in Judaea, but inBabylo n, which, except for a very brief time, was outside the borders of the Graeco-Roman world, which was increasingly centered in Rome. The greater part of thewealthy Jewish colony in Babylon in 5 8 B.C. had never thought of migrating toJudaea, and their opu lent descendants continued to flourish in th e city.I8 For an-other, despite what the Jews want us to believe today, Judaism in the First Centurywas not a unified set of doctrines, but included many groups of Jews who wereheretics according to the standards of the Pharisees, but whom the rabbinate darednot up press.'^ And finally, archaeological excavations have shown that opulentsynagogues in Asia outside Judaea took their orthodoxy lightly, ignoring even thefamous injunction about not worshiping other deities in the presence of Yahweh.If Greek gods were not worshiped in those synagogues, and there is at least oneexample of a prayer to Helios, composed in Greek but written in the Hebrewalphabet, they were at least sufficiently venerated to be given iconic representa-tion.Everyone was astonished when the excavations at Dura-Europos reached theremains of a monumental Third-Century synagogue in which at least two Greekdeities were portrayed on the walls. More recently and more astonishingly, a syna-gogue built, regardless of cost, in the Fourth Century at Tiberias, on the westernshore of the Sea of Galilee and hence in Judaea itself, had a finely-wrough t centralmosaic, in which Helios is encircled by the zodiac, with its constellations repre-sented by the customary fig ures.@ Three of the four com ers of the m osaic arepreserved. In one co mer is the head of a woman wearing a radiant crown (hence agoddess), holding a sickle; in the opposite corner a maiden with the white head-dress of a virgin is pouring water from an ewer; in the third comer, a woman,perhaps garlanded, seems to be holding up a bowl of some fruit.41Finally, we may note that some scholars believe that Hellenistic Jews werethe creators of Gnosticism as a Jewish heresy from which the Christian G nosti-cism was derived.42We have therefore no reason to doubt the possibility that a group of New

Letzim - necessarily a tiny minority, as Mr. Carter points out did exist andflourish with impunity in Graeco-Roman territory so long as they kept themselvesout of the power of the Jewish priesthood.I cannot here do justice to the argument that occupies a large part of thisbook, and I must limit myself to noticing his conclusion that Beginn ing aroundeighteen hundred years ago, a cabal of power-hungry Gentile churchmen laboredto bring forth upon the land of western Asia a mystical system destined to crucifythe whole of the Western world for centuries to come.This cabal saw an opportu nity in the fact that there was no place in thesignificant Gentile religions, or in Judaism, for the common people, or for thelowest of the low, the Am-ha -aretz, as the Judaeans characterized those wh o workedwith their hands or for slaves or for the diseased, the cripp led, the feebleand the old or for the blind and dumb . There was therefore a huge market fora salvation religion that might appeal to the masses.The scheme they [the cabal] decided upon was both shrewd and unique.They would fuse Gentile and Jewish religious speculations by assimilating a Jew-ish messianic figure [Stephen] to the savior gods of Asia; they would validate hisexistence with 'prop hecies' culled from the ancient and sacred writings of theIsraelites; and they would promise to open the temples of holiness to everyone,including the unholy thereby providing the masses with a broader-based creedthan any existing in western Asia.He discusses the way in which the conspirators selected from various my-thologies the elements of the religion they were concocting, and the points onwhich they had to decide and about which they quarreled, thus precipitating thewild squabbles of the ninety Christian sects that were in existence in the FourthCentury. And h e reviews summarily the Christians' unparalleled achievement ashabitual Liars for the Lord and incorrigible forgers.Mr. Carter therefore vindicates the Jews from any imputation of guilt, andindicts the presumably non-Jewish Christians: The Catholic Christians are guiltyof committing the moral crime of appropriating the sacred writings of anotherpeople in order to validate the existence of their divine hero; they forged andotherwise fabricated the entire literature of their church in order to provide anhistorical foundation for their faith; and along with their fellow Christians (Prot-

estants, Episcopalians, r al.) they have corrupted the minds of countless millionsover the centuries.You may not accept Mr. Carter's thesis, but you must accept his demonstra-tion that the authors or redactors of the tales about Jesus in the New Testam enthad only a superficial knowledge of conditions in Judaea at the long past time atwhich the fictitious events were supposed to take place.


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ppendixThe most important fact about Stoicism is that it was not a product of the Greekmind and was therefore an alien doctrine foisted onto the Aryan peoples ofAntiquity.AStoicism was founded in the last years of the fourth century B.C. by Zeno, aSemite ('Phoenician'), who was a native of Citium on the eastern shore of theisland of Cyprus. He had a very swarthy complexion and an ungainly body, squat,disproportionately obese in places, and flabby. Since Jews often took cover as'Phoenician s' or 'Syrian s,' it is not impossible that he was a Jew.A2He was a merchant engaged in the export trade, and when he was more thanthirty years of age, he brought a cargo of dye-stuffs to Greece, but was ruinedwhen his ship was wrecked in or near the Piraeus, the harbor of Athens. Hewalked to the city, where he listened to the lectures of philosophers, doubtlesstrying to become fluent in Greek, a language which he seems to have spoken witha heavy accent and of which he evidently knew only enough for bargaining incommercial transactions.Zeno soon decided to become a philosopher himself and impudently sug-gested that he was the new Plato by giving to his book (probably written with thehelp of someo ne at home in Greek) the title of Plato's m ost famous work, ohtzeia(Latin, De republica whence English 'The Republic,' meaning 'Concerning theconstitution of an independent state,' without implying any particular form of gov-ernment). The later Stoics tried very hard to sweep this book under the rug and thennail the rug down, but a description of its contents has come down to us.Zeno's book was pure Communism not the practical Communism of Leninand Stalin, but the U topian com munism that was so successfully used as sucker-bait in the later Nineteenth Century and was scarcely distinguished from anar-chism before Marx's quarrel with Bakunin, which promised that after the Revolu-tion the state would wither away and mankind would become one gloriou s massof raceless proletarians. We do not know wheth er Zeno candidly faced the prob-lem of how a nationless and raceless world was to be created and admitted that itwould be necessary to slaughter the better part of every civilized society, but hetaught that men would somehow become so reasonable that states, governments,courts, police, religion, money, private property, and marriage would be abol-ished, and the world would be filled with a mass of raceless proletarians, allcuddling one another, freely exchanging the products of their labor, and having allwomen in common.A3This absurd farrago apparently found some response in the demoralized soci-ety of Athens, racked by economic and political crises, familiar with all the vicesof democracy, and accustomed to romantically unrealistic social theories.A4Butafter Stoicism became respectable and accepted by the upper classes, it was aperennial embarrassment to Stoics, who did not want to be reminded of theirSemitic founder's folly.

The next Stoic of any importance was also a man of little culture. Cleanthes wasa native of Assos, a town in the Troad, oppo site the isle of Lesbo s, now the Turkishtown of Behra. The town was a Greek foundatio n, and it is likely that Cleanthes wasat least partly a Greek. but his father must have been poor, for he became a profes-sional boxer, until, evidently down on his luck, he came to Athens with the equiva-lent of four present-day dollars in his pocket. He attached himself to Zeno, andsupported himself by serving as a porter during the day and watering the plants ingardens at night. He is remembered for his famous Hymn to Zeus, one of thenoblest prayers ever addressed to a deity. Zeus is the UnivGrsal Mind, but yet apersonal god, whom Cleanthes exhorts Lead me on, promising to follow will-ingly whithersoever the god leads, but adding that if he were unwilling, it wouldmake no difference, for he would be compelled to follow. Zeus thus becomes des-tiny, and the idea is restated in Seneca's oft-quoted line, Ducunt fara volenremnolentem rmhunt with which, by the way, Spengler appropriately concluded hisUntergang des Abendlandes.Chrysippus was a native of Soli in Cilicia, a city of which the ruins wereplundered to build the modem Turkish town of Mersin. Soli was a Greek founda-tion, but its inhabitants so deteriorated that their many errors in Greek gave us theword 'solecism.' He is said to have become a long-distance runner, evidently as aprofessional, which suggests that he, like Cleanthes, came from a low-class andimpoverished family. Coming to Athens after some reverse of fortune, he tookover the leadership of Stoicism, which had become a recognized philosophy, buthe drastically revised it, discarding most of the teachings of Zeno and Cleanthesand elaborating in their stead an elaborate system of dialectics, which he ex-pounded in a series of seventy-five books. all now lost. He was the real creator ofsubsequent Stoicism. He evidently prospered from the philosophy, for it is re-corded as remarkable that he was content with one slave girl as a concubine.I have thought it worthwhile to insist, as most writers on Stoicism do not, onthe plebeian, lower-class, and mostly alien origins of the philosophy. As it at-tained some popularity, there were many Stoics, but almost all of them probablyhad little or no Greek blood, some coming from such remote places as Seleuciaand Babylon. The philosophy was a product of Hellenistic Asia, and of the scoreswho attained some distinction as Stoic philosophers, we cannot find one whom wecan recognize as probably of respectable Greek ancestry until we come to Panaetiusof Rhodes. Unlike Epicureanism and the New Academy, which were philosophicproducts of the Greek mind and expounded by Greeks, Stoicism was an importedand essentially Asiatic doctrine, and, before Panaetius, appealed chiefly to non-Aryan aliens and hy brids.Pdnaetius (c. 185 109 B.C.) made Stoicism respectable and partly naturalizedit. The scion of a Greek family at Rhodes, at Athens he studied under the head ofthe Stoic school, a Semite (Jew?) known as Diogenes of Babylon, but he wasstrongly influenced by the more reasonable works of Aristotle. Going to Rome, he


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joined the circle of cultivated and young Romans around the younger Scipio (P.Cornelius Scipio Aem ilianus, Africanus, Numantinus), whose intimate friend andguest he became, accompanying him on his travels. Panaetius had the good senseto neglect the formidable dialectics of the Stoic school, a chain of rigidly logicaldeductions from false premises, and to adapt Stoic ethics to the creed of the Ro-man aristocracy, with its insistence on duty and patriotism He could thus showthat the heroes of the early Roman republic, celebrated for their stoicism (in themodem sense of that word) had really been Stoics without knowing it. After S cipiowas murdered in 129, Panaetius went to Athens and became head of the Stoicschool. His treatise on duty (IT piz o u ~ u 0 f i ~ o v z o c Js paraphrased in the first twobooks of Cicero's De ofici is , but his other works are lost, except for a few frag-men ts. His revision of Stoicism was continue d by his distinguished pu pil,Posidonius.A5It is easy to see why Stoicism, which Panaetius had endowed with the greatprestige of the Roman aristocracy, became established as a major philosophy.And it is easy to see what com mended it to Romans and statesmen everywhere. Ihave often commented on the last paragraph of Cicero's De natura deorum, inwhich Cicero, the statesman, overrules Cicero, the philosopher, with a raisond'etat. Of the three major philosophic systems, Stoicism was the only one thatenjoined patriotism and political action on men who had responsible positions insociety. The Epicureans were interested only in the content and happiness of indi-viduals, and they specifically counseled abstention from politics: their most fa-mous maxim was h 6 ~ t h ( ~ u


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NOT S1. The obvious source of at least the prophe cy about the destructi on of the Tem-ple in Jerusalem. We cannot be certain about the doctrine for which the Sanhedrintried to persuade the Roman governor to consent to his crucifixion, but after thegovernor released him, he became a prophet of disaster until he was appropriatelykilled by a Roman missile during the siege of Jerusalem in 59-60.2. The probable source of at least part of the story about a crucifixion and resur-rection. The tradition about him, w hich was known to Celsus before the year 180,probably had an historical basis in the career of a Jewish g o b who won, and thenlost, the favor of Queen Alexandra Helene (Salome), the widow of AlexanderJannaeus, c . 70 B. C.3. See Josephus Antiquitates XVII, 4; XX, 102.4. Available from Historical Review Press, PO Box 62, Uckfield, Sussex, TN2 2 lZ Y,UK. Please send SAE for details of pricelavailability of this and other titles.5. Available from H istorical Review Press, as above.6. A crucial text is quoted in Liberty Bell September 199 3, p. 6 n . 9.7. Conclusive evidence about the earlier form of the Jews' religion is provided bydocuments from the Jewish colony at E lephantine, an island in the Nile below theFirst Cataract, now submerged by the Aswan Dam. The Jews of that colony be-lieved themselves perfectly orthodox in worshiping their five gods, including Yah'sconsort, 'Anath. The documents were edited and translated by A. E. Cowley ofMagdalen College (Oxford) in his fundam ental book, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifhcentury B. C . (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923). For a learned but frantic and attimes ludicrous attempt to explain away the evidence, see Bezalel Porten, Ar-chives from Elephantine (University of C alifornia Press, 1968).8. The disastrous consequences of Alexander's victory soon became apparent.Alexander encouraged his men to marry women of the Persian aristocracy, whowere Aryans and, so to speak, racial cousins of the Greeks, and who spoke a lan-guage (Old Persian, which must be distinguished from Avestan, the dialect of theZoroastnan Scriptures) that was cognate with Greek and had basically the same

syntax. But the G reeks who settled in the new Greek cities in Asia brought com-paratively few women with them and married more or less indiscriminately wiveswho were often Semites or from some of the many racial conglome rates. The resultwas many children of G reek fathers who were only partly Greek a nd, in themselvesand $heir increasingly hybrid descendents, reflected the contam ination n their thmkmg.Intelligent White natives, furthermore, had their children well educated in Gre ek,producing generations of pseudo-Greeks. One result of this racial agglomerationwas Stoicism, o n which see the Appendix below.9. The encyclopae dia naturally does not inquire how the Jews alienated such be-

nevolent patrons, as they have alienated every civilized nation on which they fas-tened themselves.10. As everyone knows, the Book of Daniel was written in Aramaic but only partlytranslated into Hebrew. It is likely that other texts, now in Hebrew, were firstcomposed in the A ramaic with which the writer was much more familiar and thentranslated, much as you might write a letter or essay in English and then translateit into the Latin you learned in high school. The later books were written in sloppyGreek and, it seems, never translated into Hebrew to give them an air of sanctity.11. In Palestine the Jews first adopted Canaanite (comm only called Old Phoenician,a dialect of Western Semitic), which is what we call Hebrew, although the Jewsnever did (they called it correctly the language of Canaan. ) When Aramaicbecame the comm on language of the Near E ast, the Jews adopted it and Hebrewbecame a holy language known only to holy men12. According to the silly story, seventy-two learned rabbis were immured, eachin a cabin of his own, so that they could inde pende ntly translate the farrago of theOld Te stament. Yahweh saw to it that the seventy-two independent translationswere iden tical, even to the sm allest jot o r tittle. Unfortunately, Yahweh must havestudied Greek under a hopelessly incompetent teacher, for no one who has a realcomprehension of the Greek language can read the Septuagint without a sensationof nausea.13. The Stoics derived it from the conce pt of dx6vota (perhaps best translated as'underlying meaning') with which we are familiar in the writings of Plato. It may betraced back to Pherecydes of Samos (c. 5 B.C .), who wrote in Greek but may nothave been a Greek by race and could have been a Se mite. He is sometim es creditedwith having introduced to the Greek world the Hindu notion of metempsychosis andthus of an imm ortal soul, but that idea is present in the Orphic religion, which isprobably older and attains a beautifully 9etic expression in the odes of Pindar. OnStoicism, see the A ppendix at the end of ihis article.14. Not to be confused with the Hasmonaean (Maccabaean) Aristobulus, eldestson of John Hyrcanus, who became King of the Jews (in 103 B.C.) by imprisoningand murdering his m other, or with the matricide's nephew, the second Aristobulus,who revolted against his mother, becam e King in 67B .C., and tried to suppress his

elder brother, w ho was high priest, thus starting the civil war that finally forcedthe Romans to intervene and restore orde r in Judaea. A num ber of other Jews alsotook the common Greek name.15. There is a good ed ition of the Gree k texts by F. H. Colson and G. H . W hitaker,accompanied by a reliable translation (I have checked it in many places; the onlyerror I noticed is a systematic one. One of the translators was a prominent clergy-man, so wherever Philo wrote 'Jesus' ('IqooO ~), he name is dishonestly changed to'Joshua,' to prevent Christian sheep from wondering about their Old Testament. )Text and translation were published in ten volumes (1929-1962) with two supple-

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mental volumes (1953) of writings for which Philo's text is lost, but which arepreserved in an Armenian translation that was translated into English by RalphMarcus. The fourteen volumes form part of the Loeb Classical Library, which isnow distributed in this country by the Harvard University Press. I need scarcely addthat Philo's various works are always cited by the first words of Latin translations oftheir titles.16. Quod Deus, 176. tvci 61s pici ~ o h t ~i oi~ovpkvq~ o ailv hpiozqv xoh~zst6vByq 6q p o ~ p a ~ ia v . quote the translation in the edition cited above, but rejectColson's suggestion on that Philo may have meant that democratic equality wasattained by the successive rise and fall of nations by which each had its turn athegemony. Philo is continually preoccupied with the future that God is preparing,and, as I suggested in a review published in 1949, the somewhat confused construc-tion of the preceding phrases about the fall of nations probably shows Philo's sedu-lous avoidance of any possible offense to Roman sensibilities. (It would have scarcelybeen tactful to speak of a coming fall of the Roman Empire ) I am convinced,therefore, that he meant that the Divine Purpose was to be realised in some futureUtopian era in which, after the fall of empires, all nations will dwell together insome kind of spontaneous concord under the supervision of old Yahweh, alias theanimus mundi. I cannot take time to discuss the special meaning that Philo gives to6 q p o ~ p a z i a .17. If you are interested in his peculiar mentality, observe Philo at work on theopening chapters of Genesis in his De opificio mundi and Legum allegoriae.18. An admirably clear and comprehensive analysis of Philo's misuse of the Greekwords, by Dr. Thomas E. Knight, appeared in the American Journal of Philology,CXIV (1 993), 581-609.19. Philo even adapted to his religion the famous Stoic paradox that the vastmajority of men are slaves, since they are enslaved by their desire for such trump-ery things as pleasure, wealth, o r glory, and that only a wise man (i .e., Stoic sage)is free, because, even if he is in chains and being tortured, he retains command ofhis own mind and his moral integrity. Philo substitutes righteousness for Stoicwisdom; see his Quod omnis probus liber sit.20. 1 limit myself here to the bare essentials, wasting no time on problem atic de-tails. If you have nothing to do for the next few years, I suggest that you collect allavailable information about the history of the Seleucid Empire in the second centuryB. C . and then si t down to winnow the stories in Josephus and M accabees in hope ofextracting a fairly plausible resolution of all the conflicts in untrustworthy narra-tives f you think that worth having.21. Josephus says that he was Onias, the brother of Onias. Such duplication ofpersonal names within a family seems unlikely and suggests confusion in eitherJosephus's mind or the extant text. The man's Jewish name may have been Mat-thew.

22. It would be vain to speculate to what extent the Senate had been covertly influ-enced by the large colony of Jews who had planted themselves in Rome, many ofwhom had become very wealthy. When Cn . Cornelius Scipio Hispallus was thePraetor Peregrinus in 179, he tried to run all the offensive aliens out of town, butwas, of course, powerless against Jews who had taken the precaution of buyingthemselves Roman citizenship by having a fellow Jew who was a slave dealer"sell" them to some venal and well-paid Roman, who then emancipated them,making them legally members of his own polluted family. The other Jews, we maybe sure, crawled back into Rome as soon as Hispallus's term of office was ended.23. The Jews never miss an opportunity for Holohoaxing, so they produced luridaccounts of the thousands and thousands of Yahweh's darlings who were martyrsto the True Faith apd slain by the awful "pagans." See especially the later part ofBook IV of Maccabees. Book 111, incidentally, is a gospel about a wicked Egyp-tian king who wanted to oppress God's Own and mobilized his army for thatpurpose, but Yahweh sent a couple of angels who made the war elephants tramplethe soldiers to death The author of the gospel does not explain why Yahweh neverdespatches a bevy of angels to protect his darlings in historical situations. ForTrue Believers, that is still a problem; see Dr. Charles E. Weber's review of WhyDid The Heavens Not Darken? in Liberty Bell, March 1989, pp. 36-41.24. The minority of Antiochus V also gave an opportunity to his uncle, Demetrius,to claim the throne with Roman support, thus initiating a series of civil wars thatfatally weakened the Seleucid Empire and led to its downfall.25. T he world had another chance during the short reign (138-129) of AntiochusVII (son of Demetrius), but the Jews' were saved, first, by the nai'f young king'srefusal to heed the advice of his wise councillors and his older wife (CleopatraThea, who, in her previous marriages, had acquired political experience), andthen by a Parthian invasion of his diminished realm.26. Cf. Christianity Today (reprinted from Liberty Bell, November 1987), pp. 3-7.27. Incidentally, the author of Book I1 of Maccabees was another Jesus who hadchanged his name to Jason28. I think it best to capitalize such terms when they refer specifically to the erafixed by Dionysius, especially when "A.D. anno Domini or, if you prefer, [anno]apud [ secundum] D ionysium) is omitted.29. There is no historically valid evidence for the existence of such beings duringthe First Century. The arsonists executed by Nero were, of course, Jewish Bolshe-viks, followers of an agitator and, no doubt, would-be christ, who bore the ex-tremely common name of Chrestus; they tried to bum Rome to validate one of theprophecies in the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, which had been forged to demoralizethe hated goyim. As for the famous letter of the younger Pliny, if it is not a forgeryor grossly interpolated by Christians, as some scholars believe, it refers to a sectin Bithynia, c. 112, who were suspected of being members of a criminal organiza-

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tion, but convinced Pliny they were innocent heliolaters. As such , they cannot havebeen Christians in the accepted sense of that word. As Mr. C arter remarks, therewere many would-be christs. The text of Pliny's letter depends on copie s madefrom a manuscript of uncertain date, discovered by a Dominican holy man, Iucundusof Verona, at the very end of the Fifteenth Century; it disappeared in 1508, so wecannot examine it now. The cardinal evidence for the authenticity of the letter is astatement by Tertullian in 197 that Pliny had written such a letter, which was proofthat the wicked Romans had persecuted Christian lambs for their piety. Tertullianalso glibly refers to an imaginary document which he said was in the Imperialarchives at Rome (where, he knew, no one who could obtain access to the archiveswould have the patience to look for it ). Tertullian also had an interesting conversa-tion with a ghost who had come down from Heaven to give him valuable informa-tion. T he ghost had been a woman so staunch in the True Faith that the vile "pa-gans" made a martyr of her in the arena, but as soon as her soul left her body, Jesusequipped it with male sexual organs, so that she, become he, would feel at ease inan all-male Heaven30. For the real name of this chr~ st, ecently ascertained from documents foundnear the D ead Sea , see Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba (London, Weidenfeld Nicolson,1971). He called him-self 'Son of the Star' to suggest his divine mission as thelong-aw aited chri st. He made his last stand in the little town of Bethar, whe re, asyou will remember from the admirable book by Professor Butz The Hoar of theTwentieth Century), if not from other sources, occurred a really great "Holo-caust." We are solemnly assured in the Talmud that the wicked Romans merci-lessly slew in Bethar, a town which had an area about equal to that of five cityblocks, a total of eight hundred million (800,000,000) of God's Masterpieces.31. It is a curious fact that no one has found an Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent ofthe name of this sect (variously spelled in Greek, but the forms Eooqvoi an d 'k o a io ~are best attested). The derivation of the word is unknown; for a variety of guesses,including a rather startling new one, see the little book by Allen H. Jones, Essenes:the Elect of Israel and the Priests of Artemis (Lanham, M aryland; University Press,1985). The absence of an Aramaic equivalent is not really remarkable, however,since the Jews did not begin to revive use of that language until the last quarter ofthe First Century, when the ruling rabbis even tried to forbid Jews to learn Greekwhich was like trying to order Jews in this countr y not to learn English Some Jewsdid learn the sacred languages, much as some Jews in Israel today use a simplifica-tion of Hebrew called 'Modern Hebrew,' but around 200, when the C hristians be-gan to use some readings in the Septuagint as confirmation of their doctrines, theruling Jews had to provide two translations of their revised scriptures into a kind ofpidgin Greek for the benefit of the many Jews who refused to learn the Semiticlanguages.

32. I have always wondered why the salvation-mongers who put together the "NewTestament" in the Fifth Century overlooked such gems as Agbar's letter to Jesus24

and the latter's reply (proving that he was literate) and Paul's rather extensive cor-respondence with Seneca.33. A journalist with whom was acquainted years ago claimed to have proof thatthe famous hokum-peddler, Billy Graham, was financed by the Mafia as a goodinvestment (i.e. , for a percentage of the take).34. One unfortunate consequence of this theory was a dichotomy between thebody (m aterial and therefore subject to the Demi-urge) and a soul (purely spiritualand so in the domain of the Supreme God). That led to the asceticisn and denialof nature that characterized most of the Christian sects and makes them so repul-sive to healthy men.35. The Marcionists were gradually absorbed by the more drastic (and ascetic)church founded by "Manichaeus, the disciple of Jesus Christ," but Prudentius, aChristian versifier of some talent, writing at the opening of the Fifth Century,could lament in his Hamartigenia that the secular powers had not yet killed all thevile heretics who had been trapped by Marcion's evil insanity attoniti phrenesism nifests cerebri). Modern holy men like to pretend that Mani was not a "Ch ris-tian," forgetting that he has as much right to the title as they have.36. On these, see Professor Morton Smith's Jesus the Magician (New York, HarperRow, 197 8), especially Chapters 6 and 7 . He concentrates on their psychologi-cal tricks; the mechanical tricks can be explained by any competent magician.37. He regards 'Jesus' as being, in this connection, not the name of a man, but adescriptive term, meaning 'savior.'38. See especially Jacob Neusner, "The Jews East of the Euphrates and the RomanEmpire: I, 1st-3rd Centuries A.D.," in Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischenWelt, Band IX, Halbband 1, pp.46-69.39. For a very quick summary, adequate for our purposes here, see Michael E.Stone, "Judaism at the Time of Christ," Scientific American, CCXXVIII (1973)1 , pp. 80-87.

40. See the photograph in the Biblical Archaeology Review July-August 1993,pp. 28-29.41. Each figure is identified by a word in an alphabet that is evolving toward theHebrew letters with which we are all farniliar. The characters are too small and, inthe photograph, not sufficiently distinct for my aged eyes to read them.42. See R. E . Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (Oxford University Press,1959); R. M. Wilson, The Gnostic Problem (London, Mowbrey, 1958). Both au-thors sedulously avoid offending Christian theologians.43. For a fuller conspectus of this flagitious record, see Joseph Wheless, Forgeryin Christianity (New York, Knopf, 193 0).


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NOT S TO PPENDIXA1 You will find a fairly comp lete account of the evolution of Stoic doctrine in anyhistory of ancient philosophy, and it has been the subject of innumerable books. Thefullest account that I have read is by Max Pohlenz, ie Stoa (2 volumes, Gottingen,1948). The modest little book by Professor Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics (Lon-don, 1913), may always be read with pleasure as w ell as profit. The w orks of mostof the early Stoics are lost; the extant scraps of their many writings were collectedand edited by J . von Arnim, Stoicorm veterum fragments (Leipzig, 1903-1905).Biographical information about them depends alm ost entirely on the seventh bookof Diogenes Laertius, w ho cites his now lost au-thorities; where there are variantaccounts, I choose what seems most reasonable. I here undertake the hazardoustask of trying to summarize what seem to me to be the minimu m essentials for anunderstanding of a philosophy that would have been a religion, had it built chu rchesand staffed them with swarms of holy men.A2. Cf. Note 3 below.A3. It would be possible to argue persuasively that Zeno merely extended to thewhole world the social organization that prevailed within the sm all, tightly organ-ized, and exclusive groups of Essenes, with only a few needed m odifications,e.g ., he permitted sexual intercourse with females, as was obviously necessary ifthe planet was not to become uninhabited. The later Stoics claimed that Zeno'sbook was w ritten before he had worked out his philosophy.A4. On comm unism and revolutionary socialism in the ancient world, see Robertvon Pohlmann, Geschichte der sozialen Frage und des Sozialismus in der antikenWelt (3d ed., 2 vols., Munich, Beck, 1925). This is a revised and greatly ex-panded edition of his Geschichte des antiken Kommunismus und Sozialismus (1901),and is the only thorough treatment of the subject known to me. I have not heard ofan English translation.A5. P osidonius (c. 135-50) was born in Syria, at Apamea, which had been foundedas a Greek city by Seleucus Nicator and named in honor of his wife. It is unlikely,but not impossible, that Posidonius was of pure Greek ancestry; he seems to havecome from a prosperous family, but how much Greek blood he had is anyone'sguess. He studied under Panaetius and at Rome became the teacher and friend ofCicero. He continued Panaetius's Aristotelean interests and conducted researchinto such varied problems as the diameter of the earth , the distance and size of thesun, the effect of the moon on the tides of the Atlantic Ocean, ethnic and racialdifferences, and the cause of racial decline. He elaborated a theory that the Uni-versal Mind had brought forth the Roman Empire, which was civilization. (Thismay have suggested to Christian propagandists the silly notion that Yahweh fos-tered the Roman Empire so that the Jesus-cult could become epidemic.) He wrotelong history (52 books) to continue the work of Polybius to his own time, the lossof which we must bitterly deplore.6

A6. Of course, not all Epicureans were wise enough to heed their founder's warn-ing. C . Cassius Lo nginus, the famous tyrannicide, professed Epicurean principles,but was a brilliant military comman der and tried to save the Roman Republic. Hewas also more perspicacious than Brutus, who was a Stoic, and whose scruplescontributed to, and may have caused, the eventual defeat of the faction that tried topreserve the Republic.A7. We must, however, note that Cameades' most famous disciple, Clitomachus,was a Semite or possibly of mixed Punic and Berber ancestry. He was a Ca rthaginianand he was a nam esake of Hasdrubal, the famous brother of Hannibal.A8. This was neatly stated by Seneca in his Epistulae morales, 95 (=XV,3), 52:'Omne hoc quod vides, quo divina atque humana conclusa sunt, unum est: membrasumus corporis magni; natum nos cognatos edidit. Haec nobis amorem indiditmutuum et sociabiles fecit. Liberal intellectuals are wont to sneer at Seneca,because he spoke of human equality while he was one of the wealthiest men inRome and owned many slaves. One expects such intellectuals to be ignorant,but note that their cavillation is canceled by the proposition I list as (2).

The LATE GREAT BOOK THE BIBLEBy Nick Carter. ~b 233pp.

A witty examination of the Bible and Judeo-Christian-ity as a whole by an exceedingly sceptical writer.Available from the Historica l Review Press

PO Box 62 Uckfield Su ssex TN IZY UKor f4.5 0 plus 70p post packing.


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Further writings by Revilo OliverAGAINST THE GRAIN Prof. Revilo P Oliver. Pb 256pp. Professor Oliveris regarded by many as having been America s finest post-war racialistwriter. This is the first volume of a compendium of his writings. Theessays in it include: Christianity and the survival of the West; Historyand biology; The Jews love Christianity; Which way, Western man?;Race and history distortion; Religion and race, etc. 8.00 (plus 70p p p)

AMERICA'S DECLINE Prof. RP O l i ve r Pb 375pp O l l ve rstarted his career as a right-w~ ngAmerlcan conservative. Thls ISh ~ sccount of why h ~ slewpolntsevolved to that of uncom promis-ing racial nationalist. Prof Oliverhas long been one of the lead-ing thinkers on the Americannat ional is t scene, th is bookshows just why. 4.50 (1.25)

IS THERE INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH? Prof. Revilo P Oliver. Pb95pp. Prof. Oliver wittily illustrates that a vast part of leftlliberal thinkingis based on prem ises so absurdly false that no sane person could takethem seriously. 3.00 (50p)The USES OF RELIGION Prof R P Oliver. Pb 36pp. Another skilfullywritten analysis by Prof Oliver, on the effect of various religious mov e-ments on society. 1 OO (25p)The above titles are available from the Historical Review Press,PO Box 62, Uckfield, Sussex, TN22 IZY, UK

(Please send stamped self-addressed envelope if youwould like a copy of our latest booklist)

ADDENDUMFurther Witings of Revilo P Oliver on the themes of race and

religion taken from iberty ell magazine.

Theological ClaptrapI continually have to marvel at the rarity of common sense in our peoplegenerally and particularly in Christians, including, of course, the Marxist and"Li bga l" sects. The latest example is the Christian News for December 1986.

hristian N w , by far the best single source of information about a develop-ments in the salvation-business, is the one Christian publication which I respectfor its editor's sincerity and self-sacrificing devotion to principle. Although Icannot understand how he can believe that the Bible is the "infallible word ofGod," I recognize the integrity of a publication that is free of the oleaginousequivocation and sneaking evasions that are the stock in trade of Christiandervishes today.The greater part of this issue of the Christian News is devoted to defend-ing the reading in the King James version of the Jew-Book, Isaiah (Hesabs),7.14: "The Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceiveand bear a son The operative word in the Hebrew text is 'LMH , now usuallyvocalized as 'almah or 'alkmah, which is rendered as "virgin," where mostmodem translations, following Jewish authorities, translate, "a young womanshall conceive.Note that the only point at issue here is the meaning of the word in thecontext in which it occurs. All of the vexed and alembicated controversiescentered about that text by theologians and scholars are irrelevant to thatone point. It does not matter who w rote the ravings attributed to "Isaiah" (prob-ably three, possibly four, forgers), when the book was written (probably around400 B C , possibly later), why it contains statements about Cyrus the Greatas the only goy whom the Jews called a christ (45.1, covered up in the KingJames version, but honestly translated in the Vulgate), or to whom the pur-ported "prophecy" was intended to apply. The one point to be decided is themeaning of the passage.moment of logical thought suffices to make the meaning obvious toanyone who has not put his common sense in cold storage. According to thetext, old Yahweh himself is promising a (probably fictitious) king named Ahazor Achaz that he, Yahweh, will produce a miracle to convince him that heshould obey his god. Now hundreds of young women become pregnant everyhour of the day and approximately half of them will bear male offspring. Thereis nothing more commonplace and unremarkable than a pregnant woman,and if the word means 'young woman,' the promise is a bad joke, and Yahweh


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is a jackass as well as a four-flu sher and surely the pious author of the storycannot have intended that. If the meaning is 'virgin,' Yahweh is promising areal miracle, something contrary to nature and therefore necessarily the workof a supernatural power. Now that is something that should impress Ahaz,and Yahweh thereby will prove that he's got as much divine power as thehundred other gods and demigods throughout the world who make virginspregnant with godly offspring. That is precisely the meaning that a priest peddlingholiness would want to convey, so there can be no possible doubt about themeaning which the author intended when he wrote 'LMH.In the foregoing paragraph I have labored the obvious and wasted spaceon explaining what anyone with a modicum of common sense would per-ceive at once as a datum about which there can be no question. But shiploadsof paper and hogsheads of printer's ink have been wasted on that nugatoryquestion, as well as, in the aggregate, decades of scholarly effort that couldhave been devoted to useful tasks. Christians can be erudite, but that doesnot stop them from having Faith and trying to rake the moon out of a pond.'But let's waive conumon sense on the first try and try again. The meaningof 'LM H is made obvious by the Septuagint, which translates the word bypar thenos a nd that word in Gre e k indub i ta b ly m ea ns ' ~ i r g i n . ' ~ow theSeptuagint is so called because, as is certified by a prefatory letter written byAristeas, a Greek official at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who ruledfrom 85 to 247 B.C., seventy-two (septuaginta duo.) learned rabbis wereimmured in separate cells with copies of Holy Writ, all of which each trans-lated into Greek, and when the seventy-two independent versions were com-pared, they were found to be identical, with no jot or tittle of difference. Thatproves that old Yahweh was supervising the work and the translation parthenosmust be really his; and we have to suppose that Yahweh knew what he wastalking about and was proficient in at least koine Greek.? That's as good astory as any in Holy Writ, and I don't know why Christians who want to exer-cise their ability to stop thinlung and have Faith now disbelieve it.To be su re, everyone knows that the letter of Aristea s is just a cru deforgery, like "Anne Frank's Diary," and that the whole story about the LXXIIrabbis is just a characteristic Yiddish hoax, like the Holohoax that venal "educators"are ramming into the minds of Aryan children today in the boob-hatcheriesthat we are taxed to support so lavishly. And that racial characteristic shouldmake reasonable men doubt other incredible hoaxes in the Jew-Book, suchas the tales about Joseph in Egypt, and about an armed invasion and militaryconques t of Canaan. But a l though the s tory about the divine ly inspiredseptuaginta du o Yids is just a hoax, the reading in the Septuagint is conclusiv e proofof what the Jews in the first century B.C. thought the verse in Isaiah meant. W henceit follows that in attributing another meaning to it in the Third Century, when theywere trying to differentiate themselves from their auxiliary for goyim hey were

just perpetrating another hoax, in keeping with their racial instincts. The evidenceof the Septuagint fixes the meaning in Isaiah for anyone whose common sense hasnot been muzzled, and there should be no more ado about it.But let's try for another simple solution. The appendix to the Jew-Book calledthe "New Testament" consists of a few selected gospels about a christ named Jesus.Now if these gospels are veracious and infallible, the question is summarily settledby the quotation from Isaiah in the gospel attributed to Matthew, 1.24 where thetranslation is againparthenos. If these gospels are not veracio us, and that passage isjust a folk-tale or an outright lie, nothing in the gospels warrants belief. Except forother gospels (many of which flatly contradict them), the gospels included in the"New T estament" are our only evidence that the Jesus who appears in them everexisted, since we have no valid historical evidence about him. In pseudo-historicalfiction, such as Forester's well-known novels about Midshipman, later Admiral,Homblower, the historical record enables us to distinguish between historical andimaginary events, but when we consider the stories about Sherlock Holmes, forwhom Sir Arthu r Conan Doyle is our only authority, the recognition that one characteror incident is fictitious creates a presumption that none of the events reported actu-ally occurred. If the "New Testament" is part fact and part fiction, we have nomeans of distinguishing one from the other, and the only reasonable and safe atti-tude is to accept no part of the story as factual. But that again is irrelevant to thequestion at issue. The text of "Matthe w" is incon trovertib le proof of what the authorof that gospel thought the passage meant, and he was presumably a literate Jew,probably of the Second Century, making a statement he thought his contem porarieswould accept. So here, for the third time, a simple criterion and common sensesuffices to settle the question . But Christians have to keep their common sense inabeyance.Theologians, proud of their immunity to common sense ,4 have squan-dered paper and ink on all sorts of intricate figments of their imagination.Some, for example, have contended that the author of that part of Isaiahwhoever he was, meant 'LMH to designate his own wife That would logicallymean that he was trying to put over a hoax, and make him comparable to theeunuch, mentioned by Josephus, who tried to get into the christ-business byclaiming that his pregnant wife was a virgin, whose fetus must have a super-human father. There is no evidence of that, but it is possible, of course, andwould make the scribbler a scoundrel and swindler. What is almost as incredibleis that the theologians who believe it also claim that they take Christianityseriously and think it more than a collection of vulgar impostures.After so much theological ado about nothing, the pages of the ChristianNews are perforce filled with idle discourse. They include, however, a reducedbut still legible reprinting of a scholarly article by Dr. John E. Steinmueller,who examines philologically all occurrences of 'LMH in the Bible, and a compa ra-ble article by the late Dr. William F. Beck, printed, it seems, for the first time.


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Jews and slamThere is a neatly ironic symmetry behind the current scandal, which wasprecipitated by the disclosure that the Jews were using their American subjectsto supply and subsidize the Iranians in their war against Iraq, a nation whoseterritory the Jews intend eventually to occupy after driving out the Semiticinhabitants, as they have done in Palestine.As Ch ristianity is divided between Catholics and Protestants, so there are twomain divisions of Islam, the Sunnis, who follow Tradition sunna), and the Shi'a(the party of 'Ali'), who have a different Prophetical Tradition. Both of these majordivisions, needless to say, are split into a large number of sects. Muhammad1 s saidto have predicted that his religion would be split into seventy-three competing sects;that may have been the number when the prophecy was forged. I shall not try toenumerate, describe, and distinguish the varieties of Moslem theology. that wouldtake all the pages of Liberty ell for the rest of the year.There are sects of the Shi'a in many parts of the Moslem world, but thatgreat division is centered in Persia (now called Iran), where the doctrines ofthe Shi'a have long been incorporated in government. The recent revolution,which brought K homeini2 to power, deposed the Shah on the grounds thathe, who was the servant of the occulted imam had become a heretic and thusdisqualified himself for his sacred office

When Mohammad's religious revolution got under way in A.D. 622, theJews had been preying on the Arabs for about twelve centuries It is virtuallycertain that the last King of Babylon, Nabonidus (Nabu-na'id), installed thepredatory race in the commercially strategic oases of the Arabian Peninsulashortly before they betrayed him and his nation into the hands of Cyrus theGreat of Persia in the sixth century B.C., when Cyrus rewarded them, as theBritish were to do twenty-five centuries later, by permitting a contingent ofJews to establish themselves in Palestine and start kicking the inhabitantsa r o u n d .The Jews in Mecca and Medina helped Mohammad at f i r s t , when heseemed merely to be creating local turmoil, but naturally had their own endsin view, and when Mohammad, like Luther, belatedly discovered that theywere using him against his own people, he became wary. He frustrated a plotof the Jews to betray him to his enemies during the siege of Medina, and heexecuted some six hundred of the treacherous brood in an "atrocity" aboutwhich the international predators still wail when they think it expedient.Muhamm ad's religion unified the Arab tribes and started them on their amaz -ing conquest of a large part of the world. During his lifetime, he was the Prophe t ofGod, and the great military expeditions were commanded by men who formed asmall oligarchy and, when he died, elected Abu Bakr as the Caliph (Khalifa), rulerof the newly formed state and so x oflcio commander in chief of the armies, itbeing assumed (naively) that the religion had been forever fixed by the Koran and

the Prophet's recorded pronouncements. When Abu Bakr died, 'Umar was electedhis successor, and he in turn was succeeded by 'Uthman It was accepted that thenext in the line of succession would be 'Ali, the husband of Fatima, Mohammad'sdaughterIt was at this point that a Jew, 'Abdullah ibn Saba, was converted to Islam and,in obedience to his racial instincts, immediately began to make trouble by payingquasi-divine honours to 'Ali, which, at least at firs t, acutely embarrassed that man,and proclaiming that 'Ali, as Mohammed's heir, had been ~ nte nd ed y God to beMohammad's successor. With typically Yiddish industry, he traveled about theMos lem wor ld, e nlisting notab les in a conspiracy to help God carry out his inten-tion. Although there is no proof, it is a reasonable inference that the enterprisingSheeny arranged the assassination of 'Uthmin, having in some way acquired anascendancy over 'A'isha, who had been the favorite wife of Mohamm ad, and who ,as a widow, was implicated in the conspiracy and assassination.After the mu rder of 'Uthm611, 'Ali, the already design ated successor, becam e thefourth and last of the "orthodox Caliphs." 'Abdullah's party (Shi'a), however, con-tinually stirred up trouble with claims that the first three caliphs had been 'usurp-ers,' since they held command in violation of God's will, and that the successionmust always go by heredity to the descendants of 'Ali 'k'is ha now joined in aconspiracy against 'Ali, which paradoxically undertook to avenge the murder of'Uthma n, an d thus precipitated a civil war, in which, no doubt, the parasitic raceprofited as usual from the losses of both sides. When 'Ali was assassinated, hissucceeding son was still a stripling, but was recognized as the legitimate caliph bythe Shi'a, which, when he was killed in battle, proceeded to maintain that the officeof Imam, the divinely-ordained religious head of Islam and also ruler of the state,must desc end by heredity in the family of 'Ali, thus ass uring perpetual civil w ar inIslam.Now I do not mean to imply that without the intervention of the "converted"Jew, there would not have been, sooner or later, violent contests over successionwithin the caliphate. And w ithout 'Abdullih, there would doubtless have been anendless succession of doctrinal heresies, such as are simply normal in evangelicalrelig~ons.His heresy was carried on by true Moslems, and I may exaggerate inseeing a distinctively Jewish trait in the Shi'ite doctrine of taqiyah ('dissimulation'),which authorizes members of the sect to profess different and even antitheticalbeliefs whenever they deem it expedient but how Jewish that isThe success of the Shi'a in attaining a permanent base in Persia anddominating that country was less a consequence of religious doctrine than ofracial disparity. The people of Persia at the time of the Arab conquest retaineda large element of Aryan blood, thought of themselves as Aryans ('Iran' means"land of the Aryans"), and spoke an Indo-European la n g ~ a g e .~hey resentedtheir Semitic conquerors, by whom they were forced to accept the Semiticreligion, and the heresy 'Abdullah had founded gave them a way of opposing the


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orthodoxy of Sem itic Moslem s. In the end , they thus succeeded in making Per-sia independent of the rest of Islam.

I think it neatly symbolic, however, that the modern Iran became available toJewish manipulation as the result of a politico-religious sedition begun by a m emberof their versipellous and insatiable race. 'Abdullah need not have operated by anelaborate plan, he simply applied instinctively his race's norm al techniq ue, whichwas s et forth m the Jew-Book and presumably approved by all Christian s. Yahweh,who promised to help his Chosen Bandits destroy all the people whose country theyinvaded, describes his method specifically in the screed called Isaiah (Hesaias),19 .2, where Yahweh promises to "set Egyptian against Egyptian" a nd make thegoyim kill one another in a glorious civil war for the profit of his Chose n Predators.'Egyptian,' of course, stands for any nation of goyim God's People want to invadeand explo it. And, for that matter, after they had, by instinct or calculation, infectedour race with the C hristian superstition, they had, century after century, the joy ofwatching the despised and hated Aryans butcher one another over f igments oftheologians' perverted imaginations. As for the scandal in the District of Corrup-tion, we shall have to wait until it becomes clear whether the Jews' use of theirAmericans to arm and subsidize Iran was disclosed to the public by some Ame ricanwho does not know that Social Justice is whatever profits God's Supermen, or wasinstead precipitated by the Jews themselves to stage ano ther forced resignation of astooge they have put in the White Hous e. Readers of M r. Taylor's articles may evenwonder whether the Master Race is punishing their stooge because the terroristswhom h e sent on an A

reflections on the christ myth

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